how would you go about adding a motor to a live rear axle and diff?
hey folks
per the title, how would you go about adding electric drive to a rear diff in a live axle vehicle without losing the ability for the existing drivetrain to drive the rear diff?
I want to add hybrid drive to a 4x4. I've considered an electric transaxle of some sort but they all are pretty huge and wouldn't fit up front without sump clearance issues. I don't want to make it front-wheel-drive when running on fossil fuels or otherwise lose the ability to have true 4-wheel-drive with lockable diffs, either. The perfect solution would be electric drive added to the transfer case, either on the input or output (input would let me put the transfer in neutral and use the motor to charge the batteries while stationary... not needed but nice to have), that would both allow me to drive all 4 wheels, or just the rear if the transfer case is in 2wd, and use regenerative charging when braking or all the time while driving with the combustion engine to charge.
I'm hoping there's a fairly compact motor out there with an ideal shape for being placed in line with the existing drive shaft output on the back of the transfer case. It doesn't need to be enormously powerful but it would need to handle transmitting the force of both drive systems through it. I can work with a motor I'd need to have machined or modified, but I'm not up to designing and building a motor to suit from scratch, either skill- or cost-wise.
I'd also appreciate a heads up on what sort of controller I should look at for this sort of thing. I imagine I need it to support a couple of modes for regenerative charging and whatnot
Ta <3